We have our Wave 2 Vanguard Award selection and token (!!!) to announce and a reminder that the Judge Foundry Exemplar Program Wave 3 submission window closes on 30 June at Midnight your local time!
If you haven’t submitted your recognitions yet, now is the time to log in and highlight the incredible work your peers have accomplished.
- Where to Submit: https://apps.magicjudges.org/recognitions/
- Submission Deadline: 30 June at Midnight your local time.
- More Details: Find them here.
Take a few minutes to look back at the judges you have worked alongside from the last few months from any event big or small. An exemplary action doesn’t have to be some grand, sweeping thing. The next time you’re at an event, a conference, or anywhere there’s another judge present and you see something that makes you think, “That was great; I should start doing that immediately,” or “I wish more people did this” you have found Exemplary behavior. Think about:
- The judge who stepped up to lead a complex aspect of an event or handled a difficult player situation with grace.
- The local community leader who went above and beyond to mentor a Level 1 candidate or organize training.
- The team member who kept morale high and operations running flawlessly during a grueling weekend tournament.
We work beside so many amazing people who keep our community thriving. Don’t let their hard work go unnoticed. Let’s make sure they get the recognition they deserve!
Vanguard Award Selection
From each wave of nominations, we have the honor of reading through each nomination and being inspired by all the tremendous things our colleagues have accomplished. We then vote for a nomination that really speaks to the heart of doing something exemplary to highlight. This selected nominee then gets to work with us on the creation of a token of their likeness for the following wave.
The Exemplar Program is pleased to announce the Wave 2 Vanguard selection goes to Madison Henry! Here’s what was written about Madison:
Swimmingly, Madison chose a very fitting creature type for her Vanguard token.
She was excited that Ken Meyer Jr included her tattoos!
A selection of other tremendous Exemplar Nominations this wave.
We would be remiss not to give a heartfelt shoutout to some of the other wonderful nominations from this wave. Each of these highlights the very best of our community and reminds us just how much kindness and excellence surround us.
Jim, you were a real rock at Eternal Weekend. I really appreciated having you on the sides team, as always. You did a great job of running the events I assigned to you, which was no surprise. You flipped the rounds without issue, gave correct rulings, and helped the players have a good time…but that’s all to be expected for a judge on the floor. Exemplar isn’t supposed to be for doing a good job with the expected things; it’s for going above and beyond. So: you didn’t just handle the assigned tasks, you were actively looking for problems to solve and ways to contribute. You did a great job with three events when other judges had at most two. You proactively pushed in chairs and straightened tablecloths, even outside the area of your specific events, setting a great example for the other judges around you. You let me know about issues with the TO’s website, and noticed when the land station needed to be refilled even though none of your events were limited. I’d gladly have ten of you on any event I work.
I just wanted to give recognition to Will for saving the Bothan Invitational 2 tournament. When the original HJ for this event fell ill, he worked frantically to make the event successful. He reached out to local/non-local judges and secured staff for the three day event the evening before it started. He also provided transportation for judges that weren’t local and also put them up at his place for the event. CardsHQ (the TO) is very lucky to have someone like Will locally to save the day when things go sideways. All the feedback we received from players from that event was positive and that is a direct result of Will’s efforts. Thank you for your support for the SWU community and CardsHQ.
Gaige, I want to highlight your performance at SCG Las Vegas working with me on the first major Riftbound event in the US. Our team had a few callouts from the weekend, and I put you in a team lead role as the Deck Checks team lead for the first time. This event had many challenges, but one of them was the reliance on paper deck lists. Nowadays, so many people rely on Melee to help them with seeing how many deck lists are missing, whether the deck lists are legal, etc, and the art of receiving a HUGE stack of paper lists at the beginning of an event is effectively lost. You and I worked together to make sure you had a solid plan for how to collect, how to receive, and how to verify that we had all the lists we needed, and you managed to get all 412 deck lists accounted for within a round, and spent the next round making sure they were all solid and had no problems. While I put a strong and more experienced judge working with you to help as needed, your plan was solid from before when we had that help, and you were able to rise to the occasion on the day. You put in the work and were preparing all weekend leading up to the event, and it showed. I hope that you can continue to share the logistics and intricacies of this type of deck list collection method to anyone who needs it down the line.
At SteelCity, I handled a number of appeals from everyone, and three different ones from you, Bliss. I handled two of them approximately the same, where I started with “the floor judge that ruled told me this” and a third where I instead had the players totally re-explain with no commentary on what you had ruled or info I had gotten from you. You immediately noted this, and asked about it, trying to figure out if you had done poorly. You had not done poorly on the ruling, I thought your information was so good that I wanted to give them the chance to change their story and deviate from that. You spotted the difference, and were paying a ton of attention and had a really strong desire to get things right, to the point where you wanted immediate feedback on your ruling. This was super great to see, and your attention to detail and concern for the event was fantastic.
Don’t Forget About the Previous Wave’s New Tokens!
We are sending out tokens with original artwork from Ken Meyer Jr following this wave to recipients from past waves! We are incredibly excited to get these into their hands as a tangible piece of recognition for the dedication they show to the judge community.
Don’t wait until the final hours! Pull up your notes, think about the peers who made a difference to you this wave, and get those nominations submitted today.